Skepticism

EVENTS

You are a meat robot with a network of autopilots

This is your autonomic nervous system.

One of those pernicious misconceptions about biology is that “you” — the conscious, aware, self-reflective part of your being that thinks and plans and takes in sensory information and initiates voluntary movements — is the whole of your being. It isn’t. It’s a small fraction of the activity of your nervous system. It’s a layer on top of a whole hierarchy of control that works away without “you” thinking about it. There is this whole parallel chain of distributed ganglia in the autonomic and enteric nervous system that are pretty much autonomous — they don’t take orders from your conscious brain, and they don’t report back directly to “you”, they just do their job. It’s hot, you don’t have to instruct your sweat glands to start secreting. Also, you’re nervous — likewise, your sweat glands are getting autonomic orders to get to work.

You don’t have to think about peristaltic rippling of your colon when you use the bathroom; those smooth muscles are coordinated by ganglia outside of your brain. You don’t send explicit commands to your irises to dilate when the room lights dim — there are circuits in your peripheral nervous system that just do it.

Also, fortunately, when you’re getting romantic, you don’t need to control the minutia of your body — you don’t have to consciously transmit signals to your genitals to “Vasodilate…now! Prepare to secret lubricating fluid! Engage veinous valves! Potentiate sensory input!” It’s all done for you by unconscious regulators, a set of autopilots to control the details at the cellular and tissue levels.

Unfortunately, these circuits can also operate without willing cognitive direction — they’re local and stupid and just drive the machinery. That’s why you should read Ally Fogg’s post on rape myths — both men and women can be betrayed by low-level autonomic responses that are not acts of will or desire.

Comments

Good golly, do I hate this whole “having a body” thing. I know there’s not exactly a choice in the matter, but oh the things I could do without. Ever feel like that? Utterly disgusted to have your consciousness tethered to a sack of ever-slowing chemical reaction?

There is this whole parallel chain of distributed ganglia in the autonomic and enteric nervous system that are pretty much autonomous — they don’t take orders from your conscious brain, and they don’t report back directly to “you”, they just do their job.

When we are able to copy/upload minds, a convincing interface to an emulation of these autonomous systems would be nearly indistinguishable from having a physical body.

Hmmmm….I previously worked at University of Iowa under Antonio Damasio. Surely, PZ, you must know of him given that Morris is not too far away from Iowa City. He has a different take on consciousness. Based on years of neuroscience research particularly among patients who suffered lesions disrupting consciousness, Damasio formulated a theory of the embodied mind. Our viscera and all the autonomic connections that culminate in the brainstem and hypothalamus constitute what he calls the proto-self. The proto-self is the mind’s embodiment of our internal milieu involved with homeostasis. The proto-self has a bidirectional interaction with cortical structures that together constitute the core self which is a reflection of the body interacting with the outside world. These structures interact with the hippocampus, etc. that manifest as the extended self which has a past and can anticipate the future. Do I fully understand this? No. But per some neuroscientists, you is not simply the thin cerebral cortex but a product of a continuum of structures from the cortex on down to the body. Now of course this does not mean you can command your genitalia at will by saying “erect please!”. But there are theories that all those dumb organs either directly or indirectly play a role in you being you.

Thomas Metzinger’s views are pretty close to that as well, along with a lot of other philosophers/scientists, although it seems like you’ve expanded a lot on Damasio more than just reported on him. I don’t see how a “proto-self” would somehow “indirectly” cause something in (or play some role in being) a “self.” They might both be doing similar functions in different parts of the body, or one might be an evolutionary precursor to the other. But none of that means one causes the other.

I’ll have a better understanding on if an “uploaded” mind is still me when someone can tell me if a mind that’s just had ONE neuron replaced by a mechanical one is enough to “kill” me.

I will say this though, I put no stock in a singularity, but I do put stock into our brains as “proof of concept”. So yeah, eventually it’ll get done, but I’m thinking something along the lines of 500 years from now. In other words, too late to do any of us any good, and even then…

How does the “proto-self” impact the self. Like I said, I don’t fully understand the embodied mind theories. When I rotated in Pediatric Neurology, I saw a few neonates devastated by severe hydrocephalus that completely effaced the white and grey matter of the cerebral hemispheres. Brainstems intact. Yet these neonates cried and cooed normally. At that stage even with a normal cerebrum, the myelination of the connections between brainstem and hemisphere are far from complete. Thus do neonates have a rudimentary consciousness that is the “proto-self”?

I must say I feel this is an affront to those who study proprioception and motor signalling. This schematic only focuses on the classic autonomic nervous system, yet it leaves out the involuntary motor reflexes and central pattern generators*.

Such omissions will not be tolerated, I say!

*Seriously, if you have time, look up “central pattern generators” or “spinal walking”.

When I want to fart, I feel a little pressure inside, and just give a little squeeze. When I need to shit, I feel a similar pressure, but I don’t squeeze until I’ve made the appropriate preparations. How do I know the difference? (And what are the implications of this kind of knowledge for us advocates of rationality?)

How does the “proto-self” impact the self. Like I said, I don’t fully understand the embodied mind theories. When I rotated in Pediatric Neurology, I saw a few neonates devastated by severe hydrocephalus that completely effaced the white and grey matter of the cerebral hemispheres. Brainstems intact. Yet these neonates cried and cooed normally. At that stage even with a normal cerebrum, the myelination of the connections between brainstem and hemisphere are far from complete. Thus do neonates have a rudimentary consciousness that is the “proto-self”?

My understanding of it is roughly this. The protoself is a set of feelings of awareness of the body and it’s homeostasis (conscious and unconscious). The core self is the set of feelings of awareness of the body interacting with the world and those types of homeostasis (social homeostasis, personal environmental homeostasis…). The autobiographical self is your set of feeling of awareness of your past experiences and how they relate to what you currently perceive in an emotional “read/write” sense (“write” for what you will take from what you perceive now). The protoself seems to access the outside world through the core self, and contextualizes it through the autobiographical self.

Emotions and feelings (felt emotions), are real or simulated protoself signals of deviation from homeostasis (or feelings that things are homeostatic), modified by the situational context provided by the autobiographical self, through the core self. This way real physical disgust, can become simulated physical disgust, which is transformed into context dependent social disgust which we call contempt. At the anatomical level the body forms maps in brain stem and midbrain structures, which create the basis for the protoself and core self that interact with the world and memory.

The whole thing has been very useful in helping me parse apart Tourette’s Syndrome sensations because at many levels they involve conscious feeling of normally implicit unconscious signals that also involve the autonomic nervous system. My body is essentially over-represented in my mind. It’s kind of neat actually.

@ragdish
Oh, about neonates? If I speculated I would say that the selves mature differently as age progresses as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. So the protoself would be the most mature earlier on, and the core self would mature at a slower pace, with the autobiographical self maturing as the other two mutually create it (with the contents changing as a person ages and different cognitive abilities develop).

Apparently, we’re not even going to pretend like it’s a matter of “if” anymore! It’s just “when.”

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think human intelligence will be the first intelligence we’ll be able to simulate by a long shot. Psychology is still a premodern science — we don’t have a theory of what a fundamental intelligence is yet, so I don’t know what the simplest intelligent program would do.

Regarding “if”, I see no properties of the human mind that qualify it as being anything more than a particularly complex deterministic computer; such machines can in principle have a copied “save state” running on an emulator, if not wholly uploaded to one.

Regarding “if”, I see no properties of the human mind that qualify it as being anything more than a particularly complex deterministic computer; such machines can in principle have a copied “save state” running on an emulator, if not wholly uploaded to one.

Remember that the next time you hear someone say they will be uploaded, instead of a copy of themselves. (And remember they’d be dead, since you don’t just read a brain, nondestructively, like it’s a fucking floppy disk.) If we could even do that, it’s got to be a long way from the time when we’d be able to “upload” that very person so they’ll have the immortality they’ve been conned into believing they’ll get. Because deterministic computer or not, that’s a completely different fucking proposition.

It was my hope that by filling in some of how the body and emotions work, that someone with more experience in higher level areas could make connections with issues such as tonic immobility and rape. I was tempted to try but I’m not so confident about that right now.

@ironchew
It’s because mind downloading and other issues are a distraction from the topic of rape. That matters.

Iyéska
It’s interesting, and depressing, that this post was about rape myths, and all discussion is ways away from that. Business as usual.

(Not to be taken personally by anyone, please. Just a depressed observation.)

I’m a bit puzzled by that. People on Pharyngula discuss rape and sexual abuse incessantly. As indeed they should, since feminism is one of the major themes of Pharyngula, as the maltreatment of the young is another, as much religious & conservative thinking foments an environment where such things are socially permitted, etc. It would be more accurate to describe the passionate and outraged discussion of such crimes on Pharyngula as ‘business as usual’, and that’s one of the admirable things about this site.

I don’t think human intelligence will be the first intelligence we’ll be able to simulate by a long shot.

Yeah, we should start with a creationist. Not because they’re necessarily simpler, but because their uploaded selves will be primed to accept the idea that they are simulations in software and there’s an all-powerful virtual machine administrator who may reboot them at any moment. They actually like that idea.

So if we are able to emulate a brain and even copy a specific person’s brain, that would not be that person because without the demands and interactions with a body it would be a different experience and being. It would be creating a new being or species, and if it isn’t even human it cannot be John.

Even emulating the whole body may not do it because I am sympathetic to philosophical ideas that the self also includes the environment. I guess we could emulate the whole world like the Matrix.

That recent Johnny Depp movie did some things right. Even if you use my brain as a computer program, if I think faster and have access to all knowledge it would quickly not be recognizable as me as my decisions and values change.

The technogy transhumanists think of will be a tool to create life rather than extend it.

People with various disorders and disabilities are often made only too aware of our bodies not being wholly under our control. Things that should be automatic, and aren’t. Things that should be under conscious control, and aren’t.

Healthy able minds in healthy able bodies possibly can ignore all that – I don’t know, never having had either – and consider themselves as a unity. I wonder how that feels.

As for transhumanism, any mention tends to remind me of this. (Gilbert and Sullivan pastiche on ‘singularitarianism’) =^_^=